In which I pass through misanthropy into an irrational hatred of inanimate objects.
Again, I cannot imagine how the comments could be “JOOOOOO!!!”-y, but (again) I’ve been surprised before…
The space program was a spectacular waste of extorted tax dollars, a WPA for engineers instead of artists. Watching nerdy small-government libertarians swoon in pathetic conformity over Apollo and SpaceX proves once again that Conquest’s Laws are bunk: Everyone is, in fact, a raving liberal when it comes to his pet passion. Elon Musk is a welfare queen.
Bores insist that the space program has spun off a host of indispensable inventions, but these they can rarely name, and besides, such wonders, if truly crucial, would have been developed anyhow—perhaps even faster, and more cheaply, had the government left trillions in stolen cash in the hands of private enterprise.
Perhaps some readers will find my opinions more palatable if phrased this way: “Federally funded spaceflight is the quintessential neoconservative project: a giant, wasteful crusade designed to fill Americans’ supposedly empty lives with meaning.”
Whereas Americans (although certainly not only them) are perfectly capable of stuffing nonsense into the cavities of their lives without “help” from a government middleman. They even manage to amuse themselves with astronomical nonsense on the lowest of budgets, no shaky shuttle required, as recently reported in The New York Times...
